Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s.

Drawing on psychoanalytical theories and the contemporary politics of representation, Mulvey and Wollen's second film explores the nature of patriarchy and how women have been objectified by mainstream narrative cinema. Formally experimental and socially committed, Riddles of the Sphinx subverts familiar cinematic codes and conventions to encourage an alternative relationship between spectator and female subject.

Composed of a number of discrete sections, many of which are shot as continuous circular pans, the film takes place in a range of domestic and public spaces, shot in locations which include Malcolm LeGrice’s kitchen and Stephen Dwoskin’s bedroom. The film’s ground-breaking electronic score, by The Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, was composed on synthesisers which were developed in collaboration with Denys Irving (the man behind the mysterious and controversial 1970s band Lucifer).

Followed by a Q&A with Laura Mulvey presented by Film Studies at Queen’s.